Improving electricity supply is one of the highest-return investments developing countries can make, far more so than building another highway. This is particularly true if countries want to prioritize structural transformation — to go from a norm where industries have low productivity but are highly labor-intensive to one with higher productivity and higher skills.
Thanks for sharing, interesting article.
It seems like we basically have a situation where supply is low but the marginal units are very valuable (as they are replacing small gensets). If so, is the underlying issue just that prices are too low? If electricity prices were allowed to rise to the market-clearing rate (ideally using the sort of market mechanisms used in PJM or ERCOT, but alternatively just by using PPAs) supply would increase, and there might be some degree of demand efficiency improvements. The government shouldn’t need to build generation capacity—this is firmly within the expertise of the private sector.